Eclipse Movie!

I had the Canon T2i / 200mm EF-L (with Baader Filter on the lens cap) ticking off an image every minute during the annular eclipse this last May 20.  The camera had 140 images on it by the time the sun set behind the eaves of the house.  I focused as well as I could by hand on sunspots but they were pretty tiny at this image scale.

When I had a chance to look at the images I realized I was in for the same spot of trouble I was in for the lunar eclipse movie.   Each time the scope was re-centered the image would obviously shift in the image frame.  This means they all required alignment.  I still don't know of any better way to do this than by hand ... there are no stars in the field to take advantage of normal image registration software.  

So each frame was lovingly nudged into alignment by hand (in PS4).  All 140 of them.  Then cropped in Lightroom, exported as jpgs, and finally sequenced into a movie with Quicktime 7.

It looks a bit nicer if you view it at youtube so you might want to click the link.  At the very end you can see the sun setting behind a tree and finally the edge of the roof cutting it off for a premature end.

I chose to run the movie at 10 frames per second so the motion seems smooth.  The whole clip is only about 14 seconds!  Almost 2.5hrs worth!  And of course much more than that to align all those frames! Ah well ...  I've done worse for less.

The Baader filter gives a neutral white light image.  I noticed many of the images and movies out there are colorized - on purpose or due to the type of filter used.  They are rather more dramatic but I chose to keep any artificial flavorings out of the mix.

It was a good dry run for the Venus Transit on June 5.  I learned I really don't have enough image scale at 200mm and if I don't use the refractor I'll have to get a tele-extender.  Experiments underway!

Montebello Summer Time Lapse

I spent the night of July 5 testing CCD gear.  I wanted to come home with more than some test frames so I set up the Canon with an interval timer and took 1hr 45min worth of images.  I started the exposures shortly after dusk at 9:30pm as the evening twilight gave way to darkness.

You can see many planes on their approach to SFO and a couple entering the frame from the right (headed south down the Pacific coast) on their way to destinations unknown.  Odd to think that each brief streak of light is a aluminum tube holding a hundred or more people.  Also visible are a couple meteors and some high clouds which briefly threatened to make it a short evening.  I also think there is a geostationary satellite in the mix.  It's a bit hard impossible to make it out in the postage stamp sized inline version that blogger provides.  You can double click on the video to see it at YouTube (HD even) but I'm also disappointed quality of the playback there.  It is very smooth in native playback on my laptop ... after upload to YouTube the playback is annoyingly jerky.  I'll have figure this one out.

Update:  Click here to watch it on flickr.  Much better.

 

In order to pan the field I use my Astrotrac tangent drive mounted horizontally and in "Southern Hemisphere" mode.  This causes the camera to pan opposite the earths rotation so I can get a very slow pan. You will notice near the end -  the panning stopped when the batteries died.

Montebello Milky Way

Taken at Montebello Open Space, CA  July 5, 2011
Canon T2i (stock),  Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L II USM @ f/2.8
Manfrotto Tripod with Astrotrac mounted horizontal for pannning
398 10sec exposures @ ISO1600,  5sec interval
no calibration, color adjusted in Pixinsight
Timelapse generated in QuickTime Player 7

Timelapse Eclipse

I wasn't sure what to do with all of the pictures of the eclipse so I decided to assemble a timelapse.

Only captured the first half of the event due to clouds.  Crickets just for fun.

What a colossal pain!  There has to be a better way to do this.  Has to.  If someone knows what it is please leave some advice in the comments.  I'll describe what I did just to share the pain.

Going into any imaging session with some clear plans and goals ahead of time will save yourself a world of hurt later.  This is something I almost never do.  I hurt a lot.

If I knew ahead of time I was going to shoot a time lapse sequence I would have set up on a accurate polar aligned mount to save the painful image alignment process later on.  Also I would shoot 2 or 3 exposure times for each segment to dial in the constantly changing light as the moon is eclipsed.  Obviously this doubles or triples the number of exposures but that would have come in handy later on.

I decided to downsample all the images so I would have smaller files to deal with to assemble the movie.  The plan was to go back and do this with the full resolution pictures but it took me so long to do this with the smaller images I just can't bear to do it now ... or ever.  

Now remember my images are drifting all over the frame do to inaccurate polar alignment, re-framing, bumping the mount while checking focus and changing camera conditions.  How to align all these images?  I figured using Photoshop content aware alignment would work ... but alas it only worked on the images from the beginning of the sequence - as the moon went deeper into the eclipse photoshop got confused.  Maybe Registax?  I downloaded and fussed for a while be it was too much to learn without being absolutely sure it would give me what I wanted.

What I wanted was aligned and cropped individual images.  Maybe Registax could do that but I didn't see how. OK.  Back to photoshop.  Time to put on the hair shirt.

Load up all the images (downsized) into separate layers.  Make top layer (full moon) visible - turn off all other layers.  Blend mode difference, opacity 80%.  Make the layer immediately underneath visible and highlight it.  Manually move to align.  Turn off visibility of this just aligned layer. Select visibility of next layer down and highlight.  Align.

Repeat 150 more times.  Yeah.

As you go through toss away the bad ones.  Wrong exposure, clouds, out of focus, whatever. Oh yeah, don't forget to go back and return your blend mode and opacity of the top image to normal.

Then crop the whole mess and then save each layer as a file (at least there is a script in the file menu for that!).   Then load up all of these into iMovie (we don't do Windows in Cilice-land - I am grateful to the axemen for my conversion).  Fiddle, export, be satisfied.  It's not perfect.  Far from it.  Don't think about repeating with higher resolution.  Just *don't* do it.  Not worth it.  Really.  Don't look back.

Now go enjoy your Christmas!

Storm Front

Yesterday it was partly cloudy until early evening when a storm front moved in.  Typical of the days here are clear or partly cloudy days with the formation of thunderstorms late in the afternoon.  Sometimes they dissipate by dusk and that is the window I am looking for to shoot some pictures.  Last night that didn't happen so I decided to set up the camera to take a time lapse of the storm moving by.  A fair amount of lightening but unfortunately didn't catch many during the exposures.  About 60s increments in the beginning, 30s towards the end.